Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolution

Abstract

Within the historiographical debate that has marked the Bicentennial of the French Revolution there is a widely held opinion in both France and abroad that has triumphed over the traditional or Jacobin interpretation of the revolutionary era. In France this theme has been largely orchestrated by the media, and television has crowned Franois Furet the King of the In the Spanish newspaper El Pais I happened to read a major interview with this same historian under the headline I've won! Terms such as these are hardly appropriate for pursuing the debate, for they imply, perhaps a bit prematurely, that the debate is over. First of all, we need to ask the meaning of revisionism, this critical current of thought developed over the past thirty years, long confined to a small circle of specialists and only recently propelled into the public forum by the events of the Bicentennial. In fact, the term is rather unfortunate because of its ambiguous connotations and particularly because of its confusion in the French language with another which puts into question the reality of the Holocaust during the Second World War. Nevertheless, the term has been widely accepted, and I will use it as others do, for want of anything better. The very definition of revisionism presumes that it is to be placed in counterpoint to an established orthodoxy, to a previously hegemonic interpretation, viewed by some as an ossified and repetitive vulgate. In question is the classical interpretation of the Revolution, sometimes called Jacobin or Marxist, as it was developed in its broad features from Jean Jaures to Albert Mathiez to Georges